Month: September 2011

On Wednesday we rolled out an upgrade of our indexed search servers. These search servers are used for search in both the web service and website. This release includes some fixes and improvements added to make it easier to handle some particular search cases, plus few other fixes. A fairly critical bug with respect to work searching was came up yesterday after this update, but we’ve released a hot-fix patch to solve that problem. Here are the release notes:

Bug

[SEARCH-82] – Relation Type in Work relation list is reported as {xxxx}{yyyy}zzz

After too many moons of neglect, we finally have a new wiki warden who is going to put some serious effort into sprucing up our wiki. Nicolás Tamargo (user reosarevok) has been promoted to be our new wiki god. His first task is to clean up dead pages and to get rid of a lot of cruft; then he’ll work on improving some doc pages that have been long out of date. Hopefully soon we can get to a state where the wiki is useful, rather than filling us with a sense of dread. 🙂

If you’re interested in helping reosarevok with the wiki, please let him know by leaving a comment here or contacting him directly.

We’re currently seeing record levels of traffic right now. Since the beginning of August our traffic has gone from 9M hits per day to 14M hits per day today, which is a significant increase in traffic. Fortunately our servers were able to handle the extra load, but we started getting near capacity.

Yesterday I started working on taking one of the servers from the classic site and moving it into the NGS cluster. We finished this a couple of hours ago and we now have a maximum limit of 227 queries per second (qps).

Apologies for being a few days late here, but we’ve just finished updating the servers with the latest set of bug fixes and new features. This release brings a new feature that people have been asking for since NGS – the ability to “split” an artist into artist credits.

Split Artist

With NGS, we had the ability to link multiple artists to recordings/releases/etc. While our migration script handled most cases, there are some cases when it was unclear how to automatically split artists, and we opted to leave that artist unchanged. While it was possible to manually edit references to this artist, it was painful. We now have a convenient way to make this process easier. In the sidebar of artists there is now a “split into separate artists” link:

The new "split into separate artists" feature

Clicking this link will present you with a form where you can choose the new set of artists. For example, here’s me splitting the single “Alix Perez & SpetraSoul” artist into the correct separate artists:

The "split artists" form

As with the other types of editing in MusicBrainz, this edit has to be voted on by other editors before it is applied.

The split artists edit type can only be used on artists that have no relationships, other than “collaboration” relationships. If the artist does have collaboration relationships, edits to remove all collaboration relationships will be entered at the same time. Note also that this will not remove the now empty artist entirely – that will happen when ModBot does its daily cleanup.

Bugs

We’ve continued working through the bugs as well, and here are the tickets that have been closed in this release.

[MBS-1133] – Don’t try to delete relationship types that are still in use

I wanted to remind people that we’re finally having a summit in October. We’ve rented an apartment in Rotterdam, Netherlands as our venue from 13 October to 18 October. On the afternoon of October 13 and most of October 14 we’re going to have a two day-ish hackathon for hacking on various MusicBrainz related things. On the evening of the 14th we’re going to have a social meet and greet event at the apartment. The summit itself will be held on the 15th and 16th, following an unconference like format where the attendees get to set the agenda. Most people will depart Rotterdam on the evening of the 16th. On Monday the 17th, our final day in the apartment, we’re going to have a day focused on MusicBrainz’ commercial users to discuss issues from a commercial perspective.

If you’re a MusicBrainz hacker/supporter and would like to attend, we’re going to cover lodgings and food for a limited number of people through the generous sponsorship of last.fm and MusixMatch. Our budget is not vast, so if you’re interested in attending the event, please sign up on our the summit wiki page. You’ll be responsible for your own transportation to Rotterdam.

Warp, Ollie and myself will be at the apartment the entire time and we’ll be bringing some creature comforts like game consoles and other things to keep ourselves entertained when we’re not discussing or hacking on MusicBrainz.

Things in MusicBrainz land are finally starting to return to normal, with a succession of holidays all final over and everyone getting back to work. We sadly missed the last release of August entirely, but have combined it with the latest release, which was deployed onto servers yesterday. Here’s what’s changed: